Facing Reality

Facing Reality is the one essay by C.L.R. James that I have been meaning to read for the last year. Well, I finally completed it within the last week or so. Here are some of my rambling thoughts on this most anarchist of James's theoretical works. First, I must admit that I have long been sympathetic to forms of anarchism and direct democracy. James, Boggs, and Castoriadis develop a critique of the dominant Communist and Trotskyist parties as well as the Western liberal welfare state model. 

Indeed, to them, "Fascism, Corporate State, One-Party State, Welfare State, Totalitarianism, all of these are ways in which rationalism attempts to adapt itself to the modern community." Building on their insights from State Capitalism and World Revolution, James argues for the self-movement of the workers as the path toward socialism. Like The Invading Socialist Society, autonomous and self-directed action initiated by the working-class against union bureaucracy, the state, and employers is the beginning of socialism. 

Since the work was published after the Hungarian Revolution and in the midst of the Cold War, the analysis is centered on workers in the advanced economies of the US, Britain, France, and the USSR. Clearly, the influence of self-directed workers in Detroit's  auto industry influenced James, Boggs, and Castoriadis, pushing them away from vanguardist socialist parties of the Leninist mould. Indeed, like James's view of popular democracy in ancient Athens, the working masses, when trusted to act of their own volition, shake the world and challenge technocratic elites, the political forms of rationalism, and offer the only solution to the dilemma of state capitalism and nuclear annihilation. 

However, if James et al. were correct, why did things turn out so differently in the advanced industrial nations? The shifting spatial and social relations within the factory and global economy suggest that the authors were guilty of a romanticized and unrealistic perspective on the attainability of workers councils. I remain sympathetic and find their views of events in Hungary or wildcat strikes in the US fruitful for study, but when large industrial workplaces are less common in the US, how can the self-directed workers establish workers councils and seize the means of production? How can the libertarian socialism espoused here, opposed to vanguards, remain relevant to 2018? Even if it proved to be somewhat prophetic about social change in the 1960s and in terms of Solidarity in Poland?

Despite its limitations, Facing Reality is one of the more intriguing theoretical works of James. It shows, as scholars like Matthew Quest have argued, how James's Marxism was influenced by anarchism (libertarian socialism?) and a rejection of central aspects of Leninism. Furthermore, it persuasively suggests the capacities for the masses are far more developed than we realize. Instead of a fear of the crowd, James and company argue that the masses know their interests and can act in it, for a more egalitarian society. The professional bureaucrats and technocratic elites block this aspiration among the working-class, hence the critiques of rationalism and a call for philosophy to become proletarian. Indeed, this central insight to the role of the division of labor and knowledge in a society is one I find powerful. If we want a more egalitarian society, then every cook must be able to and allowed to govern. Perhaps unrealistic, but it remains a powerful idea.